Author: HackWatchit

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Maine arrested an illegally present Jamaican offender after he unlawfully attempted to purchase a firearm. Officers with ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston in partnership with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested Jon Luke Evans July 25 in Biddeford. At the time of his arrest, Evans was employed as a reserve police officer with the Old Orchard Beach Police Department. “Jon Luke Evans not only broke U.S. immigration law, but he also illegally attempted to purchase a firearm. Shockingly, Evans was employed as a local law enforcement officer,” said ICE…

This is painfully ironic. As BBC News reports, an app designed to enhance women’s safety and vet potential dating partners has itself suffered a serious security breach. The Tea Dating Advice app, used by women to do background checks on men, identify catfishers and scammers, and share “red flags”, had rocketed to the top of the charts on Apple’s App Store. Sign up to our free newsletter.Security news, advice, and tips. And now it has spilled an alarming amount of data, including thousands of selfies. It is reported that 72,000 images, including sensitive ID verification photos that were supposed to…

How Cybercriminals and Nation-State Actors Are Leveraging Sophisticated Social Engineering Techniques to Attack Global Organizations at Scale Today, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 released the 2025 Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report: Social Engineering Edition. This report explores the top initial attack vector we observed over the past year – social engineering. During this period, over a third of all Unit 42 Incident Response cases began with a social engineering tactic. The report analyzes how attackers are exploiting trust to breach organizations, leading to business disruption and financial loss. Insights are derived from Palo Alto Networks telemetry, over 700 incident…

FBI seizes 20 BTC from Chaos Ransomware affiliate targeting Texas firms Pierluigi Paganini July 30, 2025 FBI Dallas seized 20 BTC from Chaos ransomware affiliate “Hors,” tied to cyberattacks on Texas firms, on April 15, 2025. The FBI division in Dallas seized about 20 Bitcoins on April 15, 2025, from a wallet belonging to a Chaos ransomware affiliate named as “Hors.” The Hors affiliate is responsible for multiple cyberattacks on Texas companies. “On Thursday, July 24, 2025, the United States filed a civil complaint in the Northern District of Texas seeking the forfeiture of over $1.7 million worth of cryptocurrency…

Menlo Park, United States, July 30th, 2025, CyberNewsWire AccuKnox, Inc., the Zero Trust Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) leader, has announced deployment in the UAE banking sector through its strategic partnership with cybersecurity VAD CyberKnight. The deal, secured with a major Abu Dhabi-based financial institution , marks a milestone in AccuKnox’s regional expansion. The deployment will enhance the bank’s cloud security framework and support its broader digital transformation objectives, ensuring alignment with UAE banking regulations and national cybersecurity mandates. Security for Critical Banking Infrastructure AccuKnox’s Code to Cognition security platform rollout is tailored to address the region’s growing threats to financial institutions.…

Hackers were spotted exploiting a critical SAP NetWeaver vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-31324 to deploy the Auto-Color Linux malware in a cyberattack on a U.S.-based chemicals company. Cybersecurity firm Darktrace discovered the attack during an incident response in April 2025, where an investigation revealed that the Auto-Color malware had evolved to include additional advanced evasion tactics. Darktrace reports that the attack started on April 25, but active exploitation occurred two days later, delivering an ELF (Linux executable) file onto the targeted machine. The Auto-Color malware was first documented by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 researchers in February 2025, who highlighted its…

New research from Cyble has uncovered more than a hundred cyberattacks targeting the maritime and shipping industry, linked to advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, ransomware operators, financially motivated actors, and hacktivists. With geopolitical tensions rising, threat actors are exploiting weaknesses across fleets, ports, and offshore infrastructure. As attacks grow more frequent and sophisticated, the sector is under mounting pressure to strengthen its digital defenses and address persistent gaps in resilience, visibility, and response. “The trend has become particularly pronounced in the last year,” Cyble researchers wrote in a Tuesday blog post. “Pro-Palestinian hacktivists have targeted Israeli-linked vessels using Automatic Identification…

Executive Summary We see social engineering evolving into one of the most reliable, scalable and impactful intrusion methods in 2025 for five key reasons: First, social engineering remained the top initial access vector in Unit 42 incident response cases between May 2024 and May 2025. These attacks consistently bypassed technical controls by targeting human workflows, exploiting trust and manipulating identity systems. More than one-third of social engineering incidents involved non-phishing techniques, including search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, fake system prompts and help desk manipulation. Second, high-touch attacks are on the rise. Threat actors such as Muddled Libra bypass multi-factor authentication…

Artemis is an open-source modular vulnerability scanner that checks different aspects of a website’s security and translates the results into easy-to-understand messages that can be shared with the organizations being scanned. “The most important feature of the tool is report generation. Besides scanning, it is capable to generate a concise e-mail with vulnerability information and as few false positives as possible. We automatically send these e-mails to scanned entities. We don’t know about any other country where most public entities receive similarly advanced automatic periodic security scanning – and all other entities (including private companies) can register for free and…